‘A terrible sight’
TWO people are dead and more than 14 others injured and hospitalised after a nasty, two-vehicle crash on the Llandovery main road in St Ann Sunday morning that a motorist on the scene described as “a terrible sight”.
Police report that 38-year-old Kermit Grant from Aboukir, Alexandria, St Ann, and 56-year-old Elizabeth Palmer of Mount Pleasant, Runaway Bay in the parish, died in the collision between a Toyota Coaster bus and a Toyota Hiace minibus.
According to the police, Grant was the driver of the 15-seater Hiace which crashed head-on with the 30-seater Coaster about 8:30 am. Palmer, the police added, was a passenger in the Hiace which was heading to Ocho Rios when the crash occurred.
It resulted in a traffic snarl along the heavily trafficked road that links Montego Bay with Ocho Rios.
“It’s just blood and a terrible sight,” said one man who told the Jamaica Observer that he was on his way to an event when he came upon the crash site and stopped to help the injured.
“There was a traffic build-up; I just had to help to see what I could do to pull some people out of the vehicles,” said the man who opted not to be named.
“The front of the two buses… a mean, really slammed into each other. You could see that they were coming at a high speed. Both drivers were trapped behind their steering wheels, cyaan move,” he said.
“We were pulling out persons from the smaller bus; we were pulling them through the back door. Persons were trapped in either bus with [what appeared to be] broken limbs and can’t move,” he added.
The man, who is an actor by profession, said he had to be advising other people who were helping to pull people from the vehicles to be cautious as they were not trained health professionals.
He said he was horrified when he saw one of the victims gasping for air.
“She was placed on the ground by some other persons; it was clear that she was gasping for air so we had to turn her on her side and then the nurses came and they put a knapsack under her back,” he said.
The man appealed to fellow motorists to resist speeding on the roads, especially when it is raining.
“There was a steady drizzle from I was coming down on the highway, down to about Runaway Bay. Our drivers tend to be speeding still, but if we could just exercise a little bit more caution,” he pleaded.
